Review Blog

Jun 18 2018

Jane Seymour. The Haunted Queen by Alison Weir

Six Tudor Queens series. Headline, 2018. ISBN 9781472227683
(Age: Senior secondary - Adult) Recommended. Jane Seymour is a
wonderful read with Alison Weir convincingly bringing the Tudor
Court of Henry VIII to real, exciting and tumultuous life both in
the Court and in Jane's daily life.
As a very young girl, she leads a normal quiet country life but
feels that she has a religious calling which she must follow. At
that time, all decisions are made for her by her father and male
members of the family, but having been able to convince her father,
she then observes the difference in conditions between the
postulates and nuns as opposed to those of the Abbess, and can no
longer continue her calling there. Although she never loses her
religious beliefs - which later cause her great mental pain and
danger - it is her first experience of how the world of that time
worked.
She becomes a maid-of-honour to Henry's first queen, Katherine of
Aragon, to whom she is devoted. At that time, Henry is making plans
to somehow remove Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn, in the hope that
she will provide him with the much-needed son to keep the Tudors on
the throne. The clarity with which Alison Weir describes the
intrigues, love affairs, preferments, demotions, cruelty and deaths
of those whom Henry can advance or destroy at will, makes
electrifying - sometimes chilling - reading. Her use of words of
that period - do you know what a 'kirtle' is? - is fascinating.
It would seem that Henry really did love Jane Seymour who, with the
birth of the future King Edward, gave Henry his long-awaited son.
She died 12 days later.
Throughout her life, Jane was haunted in many ways; compromising her
religious calling, her loyalty to Katherine, her hatred of Anne
Boleyn, the fear that she would never produce a male heir. In this
book, we feel that we can see first-hand the turmoils of her life
and of the times.
My only disappointment in the format of the book was that the
Timeline, given at the back of the book, would have been so much
more helpful and interesting at the beginning.
Peb Blackwell